Performing embodied identity in virtual worlds

Embodied identity, that is, who we are as a result of our interactions with the world around us with and through our bodies, is increasingly challenged in online environments where identity performances are seemingly untethered from the user's body that is sitting at the computer. Even though disembodiment has been severely criticized in the literature, most conceptualizations of the role of users’ bodies in virtuality nevertheless reflect a representational logic, which fails to capture contemporary users’ experience of cyborgism. Relying on data collected from nine entrepreneurs in the virtual world Second Life (SL), this paper asks how embodied identity is performed in virtual worlds. Contrasting representationalism with performativity, this study highlights that the SL entrepreneurs intentionally re-presented in their avatars some of the attributes of physical bodies, but that they also engaged in habitual practices in-world, thereby unconsciously enacting embodied identities in both their ‘real’ and virtual lives.     

Measuring virtual wealth in virtual worlds

This article presents pioneering research on measuring virtual wealth in an open virtual world for diagnosing the health of virtual worlds. It proved the existence of an open virtual world by proving the existence of a free choice of virtual currencies for virtual goods between distinct virtual worlds. By discussing the features of open virtual world in a circled networked organization, the article devised a virtual wealth measuring scheme, called Gross Virtual Product (GVP), for any virtual world. Based on this scheme, it suggested an accountability matrix to account for a changing virtual world regarding its total virtual wealth, profitability, user participation and happiness. To demonstrate the suitability of GVP scheme and accountability matrix, the article has conducted a case study on SecondLife.com, which showed the appropriateness of the proposed scheme and matrix. The research made in this article is very important. The proposed measuring scheme and matrix help virtual world participants perceive the possible risks of the participated virtual worlds in advance to make better decisions on virtual business.     

Do virtual worlds create better real worlds?

Over the last years, virtual reality (VR) has been said to offer promise for design visualisation and has started to be included in participatory design methodology. This research provides an overview of the use of VR in architectural design and organizational space design, and explores how this application can be integrated with participatory design. The effects of the proposed integration of participatory design, VR, architecture and organization were studied in two pharmaceutical case studies. It was assessed whether the participants actually changed the design and to what extent this affected staff satisfaction and construction costs. The results show that the design was changed, staff satisfaction improved, and costs were reduced.     

Physical fitness in virtual worlds

Academic studies and news reports have suggested that the increasing number of obese youth derive at least partially from television viewing and video game use. In particular, the couch potato hypothesis suggests that watching television and playing video games consume time that could be spent engaging in physical activities. This hypothesis assumes that video gamers pursue their hobby by pressing buttons and moving joysticks while occupying comfortable chairs placed in front of large video screens. An accurate stereotype until recently, this form of gaming is being supplanted by a new generation of games and controllers that entice players to become more physically active. Low-cost cameras and advanced video processing algorithms let video games be controlled by bodily movements, while touch-sensitive floor sensors let players dance in virtual spaces. The article looks briefly at some of these new generation games including: Dance Dance Revolution; and GameBike.     

Language and design in text-based virtual worlds

Design can be characterized using a linguistic model which compares the use and power of language in real-life with its use and power in text-based virtual worlds. In this paper, the theory of speech acts is used as a background and a point of development to analyse and model design in the virtual space. Metaphors and other linguistic constructs become fundamental in the realisation of an innovative theory that helps users to design in virtual worlds. Examples of how language can be used for design purposes and a parallel with linguistic theories support the author’s thesis that words can ‘do things’ in the electronic space.     

Interaction design studio learning in virtual worlds

The paper suggests that virtual worlds (VWs) have many unique advantages for supporting interaction design studio activities, provided that they are designed to include appropriate workplaces and interactive tools to foster collaboration and creativity. We present an approach for employing VWs that proposes the use of prospective tools and workplaces throughout the following key activities of interaction design studio courses: design brief, design thinking, design practice (conceptual and detailed), the desk crit, design review and user evaluation. Then, we describe a blended interaction design studio course on the basis of this approach, which ran through a whole semester. We found that the VW design studio is an engaging and constructive experience for students: In the VW environment, students and tutors held many online meetings, and students constructed several models about their design project, developed a digital prototype and conducted a remote usability evaluation. In addition, the persistence of the environment and the developed VW tools helped students and tutors to achieve careful feedback and reflection during the design project lifetime. Nevertheless, a number of challenges remain for wider implementation: the refinement of the instructional design approach, the usability of VW tools, further integration of VWs to professional design tools and the conduction of other full-scale VW design studio courses.     

Automating the construction of large-scale virtual worlds

Databases for large-scale virtual worlds have several critical applications. Automating their construction can improve fidelity and save considerable time. In this article, we focus on: (1) automated cartographic feature extraction (derivation of man-made objects from aerial imagery); (2) triangulated irregular network (TIN) generation (automated techniques for terrain skin generation); and (3) road correction (automated integration of complex transportation networks). The product of these components forms a major part of the input to the final database compilation via computer image generator-specific tools such as the S1000 or the Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT) database formatter     

How to address group dynamics in virtual worlds

The study of group dynamics highlights the activity in the group in terms of its performance and communication. The experience of facilitating virtual communities and teams (Eunice and Kimball in , 1997) suggests that groups go through the same stages either in face-to-face or in online mode. The paper brings together a theoretical framework based on the literature on virtual communities, Gestalt systems and online facilitation in order to address the issue of electronic togetherness, in particular from a group dynamics perspective. The empirical work on which the paper is based is an observation of a group of students in a training set playing a decision-making game. The model of Tuckman (Tuckman in Psychol Bull 63:384–399, 1965; Tuckman and Jensen in Group Organ Stud 2:419–427, 1977) is used as a framework within which to discuss the findings of the case. The paper finishes with concrete recommendations for facilitators of online communities and designers of the electronic spaces where these communities operate.     

Tomorrow''s space: Journey to the virtual worlds

The new technology of Virtual Reality (VR) provides a revolutionary way to improve the coupling of the human operator to the computing machine. In a VR system, the goal is to remove the distinction between the system and the user's environment, as compared to the conventional relationship between the user and a computer. Thus, to be able to immerse the user in his artificial world, the VR system shall make use simultaneously of the human senses and of his cognitive capacities. In practice, the VR system is the integration of computer graphics and various sensor and actuator technology to create the illusion of immersion in a computer generated reality.

VR has therefore been identified as a good candidate for the Technological Research Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). In 1991, the Agency has initiated research activities in the field of VR to identify its potential applications for European space programmes. A generic VR system has been developed allowing the Agency to evaluate the performance of VR technology and to define research activities for the coming years. The aims are to build a European expertise in VR technology and to demonstrate the applicability of VR to space programmes.     

A declarative approach to procedural modeling of virtual worlds

With the ever increasing costs of manual content creation for virtual worlds, the potential of creating it automatically becomes too attractive to ignore. However, for most designers, traditional procedural content generation methods are complex and unintuitive to use, hard to control, and generated results are not easily integrated into a complete and consistent virtual world.We introduce a novel declarative modeling approach that enables designers to concentrate on stating what they want to create instead of on describing how they should model it. It aims at reducing the complexity of virtual world modeling by combining the strengths of semantics-based modeling with manual and procedural approaches. This article describes two of its main contributions to procedural modeling of virtual worlds: interactive procedural sketching and virtual world consistency maintenance. We discuss how these techniques, integrated in our modeling framework SketchaWorld, build up to enable designers to create a complete 3D virtual world in minutes. Procedural sketching provides a fast and more intuitive way to model virtual worlds, by letting designers interactively sketch their virtual world using high-level terrain features, which are then procedurally expanded using a variety of integrated procedural methods. Consistency maintenance guarantees that the semantics of all terrain features is preserved throughout the modeling process. In particular, it automatically solves conflicts possibly emerging from interactions between terrain features.We believe that these contributions together represent a significant step towards providing more user control and flexibility in procedural modeling of virtual worlds. It can therefore be expected that by further reducing its complexity, virtual world modeling will become accessible to an increasingly broad group of users.     

Store selection criteria and sales prediction in virtual worlds

Virtual worlds (VWs) have emerged as a new context for gaming, collaboration, social networking but also commercial activity. This paper focuses on the latter, and investigates how consumers behave in this virtual context when selecting stores they visit or buy from. The paper explores store selection criteria in virtual world stores and extends earlier research in both offline and online commercial environments, taking into account the novel IT capabilities that VWs exploit. Theoretical insights drawn from the marketing and information systems literature have been used to guide the design of a survey conducted in the virtual world Second Life. In addition to identifying the factors influencing store selection, the paper investigates how these differ between shoppers and non-shoppers, and identifies the factors that affect the amount of money spent in virtual world shopping environments. The findings suggest that “Core Store Features” and “Security and Privacy” constitute the most important store selection factors in virtual environments and that sales in VWs are predicted by the frequency of visiting and the time spent within VWs’ stores. Building on these findings, the paper discusses theoretical and practical implications and further research perspectives in the context of (3D) online commerce.     

Shared virtual worlds for education: the ExploreNet experiment

ExploreNet is an experimental environment for creating and delivering networked “virtual worlds.” This system's style of user interaction was inspired by the concept of a “habitat” as first articulated in the LucasFilm's Habitat system. Players enter and interact in a habitat via their animated alter egos, called “avatars.” Habitats may be created for many purposes, including social interaction, entertainment and education. Our focus has been to facilitate the creation of habitats in which virtual communities of learners and mentors interact. This paper presents details of the current ExploreNet system, including its user interface, the means it provides for creating complex behaviors, details of its implementation, the outcomes of several experiments using this system, and our plans for its natural migration to a World Wide Web-based system.     

Evaluation of tone mapping operators in night-time virtual worlds

The subjective quality of a virtual world depends on the quality of displayed images. In the present paper, we address a technical aspect of image quality in virtual environments. Due to the recent development of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging in computer graphics applications, tone mapping operators (TMO) are needed in the graphic pipeline, and their impact on the final image quality needs to be tested. Previous evaluations of such operators have emphasized the fact that the specific merit of a given operator may depend on both the scene and the application. The dynamic behavior of tone mapping operators was not tested before, and we have designed two psychophysical experiments in order to assess the relevance of various TMO for a specific class of virtual worlds, outdoor scenes at night and an interactive application, to explore an outdoor virtual world at night. In a first experiment, 5 HDR video clips were tone-mapped using 8 operators from the literature, resulting in 40 videos. These 40 videos were presented to 14 subjects, which were asked to rate their realism. However, the subject’s evaluation was not a direct comparison with the HDR videos. In a second experiment, 9 HDR photographs of urban scenes at night were tone-mapped with the same 8 operators. The resulting 72 photographs were presented to 13 subjects, at the location where the photographs were taken. The subjects were asked to rate the realism of each tone-mapped image, displayed on a laptop, with respect to the physical scene they experienced. The first experiment emphasized the importance of modeling the temporal visual adaptation for a night-time application.     

Decision-making in-socio and in-situ: Facilitation in virtual worlds

Past research suggests that “situatedness”, i.e. the context, as well as the social interaction that occurs within it, play an important role in cognitive processes such as learning and decision-making. Thus far, IT tools have been limited in the level and type of situatedness they facilitate. The advent of virtual worlds has changed this. Virtual worlds provide open, three-dimensional platforms for creating and designing real life-like spaces; they also allow for interaction between users in the form of “avatars” in that space. This research study focuses on virtual worlds as platforms for learning and decision-making. We propose a model that explains how individuals in a group learn and make decisions through a process that is influenced by the two unique characteristics of virtual worlds that enable situatedness: the facilitation for designing real life-like spaces, and the facilitation of rich many-to-many interactions.We draw on theories of situated cognition, social cognition, and flow to explicate the influence of these characteristics on the process of learning and decision-making. Data was collected by means of a quasi-experiment in Second Life (SL). Results from this study extend and validate the predictions of situated theories of decision-making within the context of a virtual world environment and suggest guidelines for practitioners who wish to use such environments to support organizational learning and decision-making. Perhaps the most compelling of these is to focus on maximizing the immersion of the individual in the activity by stimulating his or her perceptions of others and activity-related cues in the environment.     

Beyond e-business models: the road to virtual worlds

Virtual Worlds (or, VWs) are an intriguing field of research. In particular, VWs appear to create new opportunities for integrating the business of the firm with Information Technology (or, IT). This article is a first attempt to address the topic of how owning and maintaining a VW can impact on the business models of firms and on the literature on business models, and VWs are examined in order to understand the relationship between them. A qualitative methodology is proposed to sketch a radar map framework, which is able to identify value drivers and the subsequent impact on elements of value proposition. Although they need to be tested and verified, the findings provided in this work might offer support for firms looking to VWs as a new way to implement a winning business model. Finally, suggestions for empowering future research are proposed and examined.     

Avatar creation in virtual worlds: Behaviors and motivations

Avatar creation has become common for people to participate and interact in virtual worlds. Using an online survey (N = 244), we investigated both the behavioral characteristics and major motivations for avatar creation in virtual worlds. Our results suggest that a majority of the participants had multiple avatars; these avatars’ appearance did not merely resemble the human players; and their personality did not necessarily mirror the player’s real personality. Furthermore, participants on average spent over 20 h per week and often interacting with others in the virtual worlds. Our exploratory factor analysis yielded four major motivations: virtual exploration, social navigation, contextual adaptation, and identity representation.     

Creating ambient music spaces in real and virtual worlds

Sound and, specifically, music is a medium that is used for a wide range of purposes in different situations in very different ways. Ways for music selection and consumption range from completely passive, almost unnoticed perception of background sound environments to the very specific selection of a particular recording of a piece of music with a specific orchestra and conductor at a certain event. Different systems and interfaces exist for the broad range of needs in music consumption. Locating a particular recording is well supported by traditional search interfaces via metadata. Other interfaces support the automatic creation of playlists via artist or album selection, up to more artistic installations of sound environments that users can navigate through. In this paper we present a set of systems that support the creation of as well as the navigation in musical spaces, both in the real world as well as in virtual environments. We show common principles and point out further directions for a more direct coupling of the various spaces and interaction methods, creating ambient sound environments and providing organic interaction with music for different purposes.